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In Europe, more than two thirds of all academic anthropologists are living in precarity

Published on February 1, 2021 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Europe, politics, University / Academia

(via FocaalBlog) In the general public, academics are often viewed as being part of an elite, who lives comfortable lives. In reality this is only true for a small minority of well-paid professors, while the situation for most academics rather ressembles those of other underpaid workers like cleaners or delivery or Uber-drivers – especially since universities are no longer run like public institutions but as corporations with managers and PR departments that all compete for being "world leading".

A recently published survey among anthropologists in Europe provides us with neat but disturbing statistics. The survey was carried out online and before Corona, between 18 June 2018 and 22 July 2018.

"Anthropology in Europe is increasingly a precarious profession", we read in the 102 page survey among members of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), an initiative by the PrecAnthro Collective, whose members mobilised since 2016 to raise awareness about the challenges of developing an academic career in anthropology.

Increasing precarious employment conditions is a major issue here:

Much corridor talk at the 2014, 2016 and 2018 EASA conferences, and many informal chats during the online-only 2020 conference were neither about the latest ground-breaking study nor even about the latest careerbreaking scandals, but rather about the lack of career prospects, which ultimately prevents highly skilled scholars from conducting groundbreaking academic work

Permanent contracts are rare, at least until you get tenure as professor in the age of 50 or so if you are lucky. Short term contracts are the norm, instead, often shorter than six months, thus leaving anthropologists in a constant state of insecurity:

Among those who identified ‘employed in academia’ as their primary status, 44.3% had a permanent contract, and only 31.3% were on permanent and full-time contracts. This means that over two thirds of all academic anthropologists in Europe are in some form of precarious employment.

There are huge differences within Europe and – as expected from my site – Germany, one of the most inequal countries in Europe with growing poverty rates, comes out as one of the worst – or worst country to be. While 49.4% of the respoindents in the UK had permanent contracts, in Germany it was only 12.1%. The numbers for women are of course even worse than for men:

While men and women were equally represented among those on fixed-term contracts, women held a higher proportion of very short-term contracts, i.e. under six months. Women were also less likely to be in senior positions (29% of men versus 19% of women).

One consequence is that you constantly need to look for new employment opportunities. Especially early career researchers "spend an excessive amount of time at work applying for jobs". Half of all respondents spent more than one month a year applying for jobs. Less than 10% had not applied for a job in 2018.

Changing jobs means in many cases leaving your country, being constantly on the move:

Among those aged 31–35 years, only one third had not left their countries for work or education (excluding fieldwork), while a quarter had changed countries for work three or more times over the last five years.

In most countries, the salary is generally below avarage. Especially academics in East Central and South East Europe said their incomes "did not meet their needs", and that they were "unable to save or manage unexpected expenses". Among all respondents, only one in four anthropologists had money left at the end of the month.

Less than half of the respondents reported an ability to cover their living expenses solely with the wages from one full-time job. Over one fifth of EASA members also rely on parents and one tenth on family members to support them in making a living.

Temporary teaching fellows or instructors (that are growing in number) were the most vulnerable:

Of these, 68.8% said their income did not cover their needs, 80.7% had no money left at the end of the month, only 6.2% were ‘completely’ in a position to deal with an unexpected expense, and 53.1% were ‘not at all’ able to do so.

Generally, universities do not seem to be a nice place to work in, as also discrimination, harassment, unfair treatment seem to be widespread.

Very worrying: The interests of precarious anthropologists are not sufficiently represented in their academic context:

Precariously employed academics did not join unions because they felt that unions did not represent their interests as the unions were dominated by senior faculty or administrative staff. Insecurity regarding staying in academia or in the country of employment was another reason for not joining.

Membership in unions differs extremly, though. While in Scandinavia most academics are members (Denmark 96% and Finland 84%), the opposite is true for Germany (23%) or Poland and France (4% both).

The situations is probably even grimmer as the report is not representative for whole Europe. Most of the 809 EASA members who completed the questionnaire resided in the West and North of Europe – only 9.7% were residents of East Central and South East Europe.

Susana Narotzky from the University of Barcelona, Spain, sees this underrepresentation as a structural problem within the EASA. In her blog post A History of Precariousness in Spain in the FocaalBlog she writes:

In Spain, many of the part-time non-tenured teaching positions have extremely low salaries and their holders juggle a plurality of jobs that make research difficult. As a result, membership in EASA –which is fundamentally tied to participation in the biennial conference—is rarely sought.
Therefore, a large contingent of (probably) the most precarious voices, many of which are not proficient in English, is not represented in the survey. This may also explain why a large majority of respondents work in Northern institutions which have more resources than those in other countries.

Exclusion by language is also a issue that Natalia Buier from the Central European University criticizes in her post What sample, whose voice, which Europe? at the FocaalBlog. "The reality of EASA is", she writes, "that for an association that calls itself European it is a surprisingly monolingual one."

Furthermore, middle-class respondents are overrepresented in the survey. The situation of anthropologists with working class background needs more attention.

In Spain a common experience is that of the grinding of working-class lives not only through exclusion, but also through inclusion into academic spaces.

And while the authors of the report seem to imply that working-class students are at risk of being increasingly underrepresented, there is at least one level at which we are likely to see an increase of the presence of working-class students: the doctoral level. (…). In a world of increasing exploitation, (…) the stability of a four-year PhD scholarship of roughly 1000 euros offers many of working-class background the possibility of more stability than most alternatives. (…)

Increased abilities but diminished resources do not change the fact that the professional machine will probably spit out the student of working-class background at the first opportunity: but that cut out point seems to be increasingly moving towards the post-doctoral phase, where the prolonged subsistence on no or below subsistence level income requires resources that are less likely accessible to colleagues of working-class background.

So, what to do? The recommendations in the report are written in diplomatic language and seem tame and weak.

Without touching the root of the problem, the commercialization of academia, little can be done as Don Kalb from the University of Bergen writes in his post Anthropological Lives Matter, Except They Don’t at Focaal:

Academia should not be run as McKinsey would like it. Our own discipline nowadays has really no other professional rationale than helping to produce democratic, intelligent, and progressive people and societies, not just “more stuff” – research articles, students, diplomas, scholars – against lowest cost. (…)

Outdated academic structures and hierarchies, as well as actively managed neoliberal ones (Netherlands, UK), will have to change if the continent wants to respond creatively and progressively to the massive transformations that are coming to us. Anthropologists should actively make that case and show that they must be part of the creative dynamism.

>> read the whole report

There is a growing amount of scholarship on academic precarity that I might come back to later. For now check precarity in The Anthropology Newspaper.

SEE ALSO EARLIER ON ANTROPOLOGI.INFO:

Protests at Yale: When Walmart’s management principles run an anthropology department

University reforms – a threat to anthropology?

Minority scholars treated as second class academics: Still a racial bias in anthropology

How can we create a more plural anthropological community?

(via FocaalBlog) In the general public, academics are often viewed as being part of an elite, who lives comfortable lives. In reality this is only true for a small minority of well-paid professors, while the situation for most academics rather…

Terror in France and ISIS’ Revolution: Anthropologists try to see the whole picture

Published on November 21, 2015 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Europe, Middle East, politics, religion cosmology, Us and Them

(draft, post in progress) More surveillance, more bombs, more border controls, less democracy, less freedom: Europe is reacting hysterically after the deadly terror attacks in Paris one week ago. How to make sense of what is happening?

The deadly terror attack in France has brought, as anthropologist Jeremy Trombley at Struggle forever writes, "the violence that people around the world experience on a daily basis back into our own sheltered and secured lives. They remind us not only that the world is a violent place, but that, perhaps, our lives are peaceful because there is violence elsewhere."

People in Europe have during the recent days got the chance to get an inside view into the struggles of people in less priviledged countries that are regularily bombed by the West.

In theory there is a slight possibility for some kind of solidarity or cosmpolitanism to develop out of this, and a critique of Western policies.

The common discourse in mainstream media is – unsurprisingly – a totally different one.

Heather E. Young-Leslie was right when she two days after the attack wrote:

Sadly, l’horreur of Paris 13 Nov. 2015 will, probably, lead to greater political support for the hawks: the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, pro-militaristic, pro-fascist and neo-Nazi elements in France and other parts of the EU. We will hear that it is necessary to relinquish freedoms in order to protect liberté, and solidarité will be purchased with rhetorics of anti-immigration and victim-blaming.

Double standards. Photo: ugocuesta, flickr

This natio-chauvinist "we" against "them" rethoric tends to silence cautious attempts to discuss the wider context of the terrorist attack, including the role of the West in creating terrorism, and the possibility that the operations by Western powers can be viewed as terrorism as well.

"Them", in the official discourse, not only refers to the Daesh/ISIS attackers but increasingly to all muslims and "non-western" refugees (like those who are escaping the madness i Syria) and immigrants and those who speak Arabic.

Anthropologists react

Several anthropologists, in their immmidiate reactions to the terror attack, insisted to focus on the wider global context of the terror attacks where the Western powers do bear some responsibilities.

Keith Hart, is writing from Paris, in his open letter to his daughter, first published on Facebook:

The fact is that the French killed 1 mn people in the Algerian war of independence, the second genocide they got away with (the other being Vichy). They have now made themselves the US’ closest ally in bombing North Africa and the Middle East, invading Mali, Central African Republic etc. In radio discussions here no-one ever questions their right to do this.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen is reacting in a similar way. "The Syrian conflict, the rise of IS/Daesh, the flows of people out of the country and the reactions with which they are being met in Europe, the feeling of disenfranchisement and marginalisation prevalent among youths of North African origin in France, and the Western countries’ active destabilisation of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya cannot be seen independently of each other", he stresses:

[T]he value of human lives varies depending on where you live and who you are. This may be stating the obvious, but there is rarely if ever a major outrage in the rich countries when a drone attack or a missile targeting a terrorist leader instead ends up killing dozens of innocents, including children. Yet this happens routinely and frequently. Not everybody agrees that it is acceptable that the rich countries murder civilians in poor countries, and the Paris terrorist attack can thus be understood as an act of retribution.

Viewed from an subversive anthropological perspective, the distinction between good and bad guys, between terrorists and victims is not as clear as mainstream politicians suggest.

Terrorists or revolutionaries?

Maybe the term terrorist is not a very helpful one at all. Maybe we can get a better understanding of IS/Daesh when we call them – as anthropologist and terror researcher Scott Atram does – for revolutionaries.

In the Guardian he writes that treating Isis as a form of "terrorism" or "violent extremism" would mask the menace. Instead, he describes Isis as being part of a "dynamic, revolutionary countercultural movement of world historic proportions, with the largest and most diverse volunteer fighting force since the second world war".

In a fascinating interview om Russia Today, he explains the revolutionary aspects and even draws lines back to Hitler.

Sophie Shevardnadze, the interviewer,wonders how it can be possible that ISIS’s horror brings them even more supporters. "Basically", she says, "what I am asking, is ISIS appealing to sick and disturbed people more than normal people?". The anthropologists answers:

No, it appeals to people in span of normal distribution. I mean, it’s like any revolutionary movement, that’s why I think even calling it terrorism or just extremism is beyond the pale. (..) It’s very much like the French revolution, or even the Bolshevik revolution or even the National Socialist revolution… I mean, look at the French revolution, they were eating one another just like Al-Nusra and ISIS and other groups are eating one another like bloodied sharks, and they were invaded by a coalition of the Great Powers, and yet not only they survived, but they endured, and they introduced the notion of terror itself, as an “extreme measure” as they called it, “for the preservation of democracy”, and every revolution since then, every real revolution has done pretty much the same thing, pretty much successfully, so ISIS is no exception.

(…) In any kind of truly revolutionary movement there’s a feeling of invincibility once you’ve fused with your comrades in your cause. The idea is their history is on their side. So, even if they take battlefield losses, they’re not going to consider that a loss at all.

ISIS sings the same tune Hitler did, promising Utopia in the end, the anthropologist says:

Look, George Orwell in his review of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” back in 1939 have described the essence of the problem. He said: “Mr. Hitler has discovered that human beings don’t only want peace and security and comfort and free from want. They want adventure, glory and self-sacrifice, and Mr. Hitler’s appealed to that – and while the Oxford student union at that time vowed to never fight again, Mr. Hitler has 80 million people fall down to his feet, in one of the most advanced countries in the world.” How did that happen? Again, ISIS is appealing to the same sort of sentiments, that have been appealed to throughout human history… and no, I don’t think we’ve learned much from history about that.

ISIS consists of young poeple, people in transition. ISIS, the interviewer suggests, might be seen as a form of teen rebellion then? The anthropologist agrees. It is – as most revolutionary movements, driven by young – and educated people, he says. But, the interviewer wonders, we’re used to think that young people want freedom, but ISIS is forbidding this?

The anthropologist answers:

I got a call from head of Medical School telling me that her best students have just left to set up field hospital for ISIS in Syria, and she was asking me why would they do this; and I said, “because it’s a glorious and adventurous mission, where they are creating a Brand New World, and they do it under constraints.” I mean, people want to be creative under constraints. A lot of young people just don’t want the kind of absolute freedom you’re talking about. The choices are too great, there’s too much ambiguity and ambivalence. There are too many degrees of freedom and so one can’t chart a life path that’s at all meaningful, and so these young people are in search of significance, and ISIS is trying to show them a way towards significance.

Again, we have to take it very seriously, that’s why I think it’s the most dynamic counter-cultural movement since WWII, and it’s something I don’t think people are taking seriously, just dismissing them as psychopaths and criminals and… this, of course, is something that we have to destroy. I think, we’re on the wrong path in terms of the way we’re going to destroy it.

So what is they way out of this? The first step is in Atran’s view to understand this movement. Current counter-radicalisation approaches lack in his view the mainly positive, empowering appeal and sweep of Isis’s story of the world, and the personalised and intimate approach to individuals across the world. What inspires the ISIS-fighters is not so much the Qur’an but "a thrilling cause that promises glory and esteem".

There are not many anthropologists who are conducting fieldwork among extremists like ISIS/Daesh. It’s not just because it’s dangerous, Atran says in an interview with Scientific American:

It’s because human subjects reviews at universities and especially the [US] defence department won’t let this work be done. It’s not because it puts the researcher in danger, but because human subjects [research ethics] criteria have been set up to defend middle class university students. What are you going do with these kind of protocols when you talk to jihadis? Get them to sign it saying, “I appreciate that the Defense Department has funded this work,” and by the way if you have any complaints, call the human subjects secretary? This sounds ridiculous and nothing gets done, literally.
(…)
Then you have crazy things [required by US funding bodies] like host country authorization. Suppose you want to do work in Israel and Palestine. So you go to the Israelis, say, “We want to do studies, just like we do in American universities” and say, “We need host country authorization from some government.” They say, “Are you crazy?” And in many countries that are in chaos, who’s going to give you permission?

PS: Maybe it might be fruiful to take a look at "On Suicide Bombing" by Talal Asad where he – among others – writes:

It seems to me that there is no moral difference between the horror inflicted by state armies (especially if those armies belong to powerful states that are unaccountable to international law) and the horror inflicted by its insurgents. In the case of powerful states, the cruelty is not random but part of an attempt to discipline unruly populations. Today, cruelty is an indispensable technique for maintaining a particular kind of international order, an order in which the lives of some peoples are less valuable than the lives of others and therefore their deaths less disturbing.

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Bush, "war of terror" and the erosion of free academic speech: Challenges for anthropology

(draft, post in progress) More surveillance, more bombs, more border controls, less democracy, less freedom: Europe is reacting hysterically after the deadly terror attacks in Paris one week ago. How to make sense of what is happening?

The deadly terror…

What the burial of a 4 year old boy says about daily life more than 24 000 years ago

Published on October 10, 2012 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, culture traditions, Europe, history, journal articles / papers

Antropologi.info is mainly about social anthropology. So, maybe now it’s time to get inspired by a paper from a neighbouring discipline – archaeology. Lukas Loeb has sent me this paper that he’d like to share with others: The Human Burial of the Abrigo Lagar Velho Child. An analysis of human burial and the understanding of social relations and ancient society.

Loeb is currently a student in the Social Science and Economy Department at the University of Agder, Norway. The paper was written as a part of an anthropology course he took at the University of British Columbia, Canada, in 2009/2010. The course, an Introduction to World Archaeology, provided a survey of world archeology from the emergence of humankind to the beginning of state societies.

What is your essay about, Lukas Loeb?

– My essay is about the human burial of the Abrigo Lagar Velho Child, and the introduction of modern humans in Europe. How we can use a single burial to discover ancient cultures and study their social life by the burial itself and the tools and vegetation surrounding it?

In your email to me, you wrote this is an important topic that you’d like to share with others. Why?

– Many say that the Neanderthals disappeared from Europe because the continent were overtaken by modern humans. My essay discusses the important topic of the modern humans and Neanderthals interacted and that there were some sort of gene flow between these two human species.

Is this discussion also relevant for cultural- and social anthropologists?

– I would say that this discussion is both important and relevant for both cultural- and social anthropologists, this essay discusses and analyzes the burial itself and how it reflects to the religion, social life, hierarchy and status that was present 24,500 BP.

As a bonus: Some links for those who want to know more about your topic?

João Zilhão: Fate of the Neandertals (archaeology.org)

Lagar Velho – the Hybrid Child from Portugal (donsmaps.org)

João Zilhão and Erik Trinkaus (ed): Portrait of the Artist as a Child. The Gravettian Human Skeleton from the Abrigo do Lagar Velho and its Archeological Context (scribd.com)

Thanks for this short interview!

Download the paper (pdf, 421kb)

Antropologi.info is mainly about social anthropology. So, maybe now it's time to get inspired by a paper from a neighbouring discipline - archaeology. Lukas Loeb has sent me this paper that he'd like to share with others: The Human…

Guardian sends anthropologist on fieldwork among bankers in London

Published on September 20, 2011 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, culture traditions, Europe, politics

Can you make a complex subject like the world of finance accessible to outsiders? What about sending an anthropologist into the world of bankers in London’s financial district and let him blog his findings?

That’s the new project of the Guardian. They have engaged Dutch anthropologist Joris Luyendijk who has also a background as a journalist (perfect combination) to start an anthropological banking blog.

It’s a project in the spirit of public anthropology and anthropology 2.0 – at least in theory.

The anthropologist explains in his introductory post:

When I started interviewing financial workers this summer, I knew as little as the average Guardian reader. So I plan to start at the beginning. Every interview will be posted on the web, with comment threads open to let other outsiders to ask questions and, who knows, to let insiders to elaborate on the material. Over time I hope to build an intellectual candy shop full of interesting stuff about the world of finance, stuff that will then help you as a reader make better sense of the news.

It is important for outsiders to learn more about this sector, he stresses:

Finance directly affects everyone’s interests, but many have a hard time maintaining their interest in it. But as the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the following three years have shown, the financial world is too important to leave to the bankers – in fact in some countries democracy is beginning to look like the system by which electorates decide which politician gets to implement what the markets dictate.

The people in this very powerful sector are worth learning more about. And the good news is, when you listen to them in their own words, that can actually be pretty entertaining. And humanising.

But how anthropological are portraits of bankers? And does “humanising” mean depoliticising or even legitimizing their actions? Do we get a better understanding of the political economy of finance?

So far he has posted around ten portraits of financial workers, no analysis so far. The project has just started.

What I find striking: The financial workers don’t reflect about the consequences of their work. They seem to be obsessed with pleasing their clients, in making their clients more successful and richer.

You’ll find critical reflections in the comment sections only – like here

..and to generate wealth you have to generate poverty. Success?

It might sound as if anthropological studies of bankers are something extraordinary. No longer. There has been surprisingly much interest among anthropologists for the world of finance. Karen Ho for example has been on fieldwork in the Wall Street: Anthropologist Explores Wall Street Culture. Another anthropologist, Gillian Tett, who works in the Financial Times, explained three years ago that she used anthropology to predict the financial crisis and that it’s important to understand the tribal nature of banking culture.

That’s the new project of the Guardian.…

UK Riots: Let’s talk about class and oppressive states

Published on August 16, 2011 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Europe, politics, poverty, Us and Them

The notion that there is democracy in the West, while there is none in the “rest” might be one of the most powerful and dangerous myths of our time. In reality, democracy is a contested concept everywhere in the world, not only in Egypt or Tunesia, but also in Britain.

from Rap responds to the riots: ‘They have to take us seriously’ (Guardian 12.8.11)

Two months ago Maha Abdelrahman said on a conference in Cairo about the global context of the Egyptian revolution:

– What I think is happening is that people from Egypt, Tunesia, Russia, Greece, UK and many other countries are discovering that they are natural allies, engaged in a common purpose.

– We’re not in the middle of a revolution, but we might be in the midth of an important phase where revolutionary development on a global scale is taking place and the limits of the global neoliberal capitalism are being brought to light.

Darcus Howe, a 68-year-old West Indian writer, civil rights activist and resident of South London, told a shocked BBC anchor Fiona Armstrong in front of burnt down houses:

– I don’t call it rioting. I call it an insurrection of the masses of the people. It is happening in Syria, it is happening in Clapham, it’s happening in Liverpool, it’s happening in Port-au-Spain, Trinidad, and that is the nature of the historical moment.

Much is said and written about the riots in England. The discourse itself is highly interesting. The political establishment and its allies in mainstream media quickly dismissed the riots in England as a brainless, unpolitical, and criminal act by a “partly mentally disturbed underclass”. They treated the rioters and activists in an strikingly arrogant, patronizing and classist way. The BBC interview with rights activist Darcus Howe is a good example:

The BBC sounded in their coverage of the riots like Mubarak’s state television during the Egyptian revolution, says Egyptian blogger and activist Mostafa Hussein:

“BBC is making it sound like young people have a single aim and that’s to loot and vandalise. Nothing or very little on why they are doing so.”

These reactions show clearly what’s at stake in Britain, Joe Hoover and Meera Sabaratnam write in their post Reading violence- what’s political about the London riots. The reactions confirm the fact, that Britain is a hierarchical society where the rich oppress the poor:

This is a solid, deep form of alienation built up not overnight, or over the last two years in response to cuts (shame on you Ken Livingstone) but one which is built into the fabric of the broad political settlement of the last decades and reflected in the city’s divisions between rich and poor, between black, brown and white, between young and old.

The riots rest on a conviction not just that the barriers are there, but that they are solid walls, through which none will pass. The reactions to them as ‘mindless violence’ simply confirm this fact. It is not that people are rioting because they don’t have jobs, but because they must believe, ultimately, gloomily, grimly, that there is nothing for them in their future.

While the mass protests in Egypt and the rioting in England cannot be equated (“Egyptians and Tunisians took revenge for Khaled Said and Bouazizi by peacefully toppling their murdering regimes, not stealing DVD players.“not by stealing DVDs”, Mosa’ab Elshamy comments), the contexts in which they occurred are similar: growing inequalities due to neoliberal policies and an inceasingly oppressive state that does not care for its citizens.

SocProf from the Global Sociology blog writes:

So, whatever the initial reason for the uprising in Tottenham, it is clear that many of the countries where austerity policies are being imposed from above on the general population are facing socially explosive situations.(…)

SocProf lists examples from Israel, Chile, Greece, Spain and the "Arab Spring":

What we see is the global civil society rising up against what is clearly exposed as the alliance of the corporate sector (…) and Western governments (…).

In this process, the governments turn repressive against oppositional voices. Several examples (including from the UK) are provided that show how dissent is criminalised

The message is clear: dissent will not be tolerated as the whole anti-terror apparatus is used not against terrorists but against cyber-dissenters and protesters.

Why the riots are political – a good summary

As reaction to the riots, Cameron considers – in similar way as his friend Mubarak (source) earlier this year – to shut down social network sites like Facebook and Twitter and sms services as well for “those suspected of planning criminal acts”.

He talked like a dictator when he replied to criticism from rights groups: He will not let “phony concerns about human rights” get in the way of the “fight back” against the riots, he said. In the macrumors forum, he was called David "Mubarak" Cameron. It is no longer uncommon to equate the UK with (former) Middle East dicatorships. The story San Francisco Cops Jam Cell Phones to Prevent Protest is introduced this way: "It’s not just the London police and Middle East dictators who try to curb unrest by clamping down on communications networks."

When we link the current riots in England with the so called Arab Spring, we would see other things than “midlessness” at stake, suggests sociologist Joost Van Loon on Space and Culture:

Suddenly, criminals would become legitimate protestors fighting against an oppressive state who have turned democracy into a puppet show.

Anthropologist Sean Carey criticizes the reactions of the politicians as well:

Mindlessness would create randomness, but the events unfolding are far from being random. Instead, I would argue that what we are witnessing is a significant symbolic statement about the way power – the power of life and death exercised by police officers as well as the power to consume – is arranged in British society.

The riots are said to have started with a protest against the controversial killing of Mark Duggan by the English police during an anti-gun crime operation. Yet no commentator links the incredible number of riots in different cities to that particular incident, notes anthropologist Gabriel Marranci.

And when somebody, as Darcus Howe in the mentioned BBC interview is trying to address this issue, he is cut off and silenced. "We cannot talk about this now. We don’t know what has happened. We have to wait for the police inquiry", the BBC news anchor said.

Al Jazeera gives an account of the events:

On Saturday, hundreds of people gathered outside the Tottenham police station, peacefully calling for “justice” for Mark Duggan, a man killed by officers three days prior. Police stood in formation, separating the community members from the station they were guarding, until a 16-year-old woman reportedly approached an officer to find out what was going on.

According to a witness account, some officers pushed the young woman and drew their batons. “And that’s when the people started to retaliate. Now I think in all circumstances, having seen that, most people retaliate,” said the witness.

Witness account

“When the rioters themselves are asked, they will say that they are abused by police, harassed by them, and nobody’s done a thing about it”, says Richard Seymour PhD candidate at the London School of Economics to Al Jazeera. There have been 333 deaths in police custody between 1998 and 2010 in Britain. Large, peaceful protests in response to these killings were more or less ignored, he said. Not a single officer has been prosecuted.

As a result, Duggan’s killing crossed a threshold for young people, angry with the systems that have left them behind, and tired of non-violent protest that goes without much response.

By the way, in an article in the Danish newspaper Information, Rune Lykkeberg reminds us on a book that was reviewed in all major English media only two months ago: Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones. This book “exposes class hatred in modern Britain”, the reviewer in the Independent explains. “In the public domain of news and culture, within the arc of some 30 years, a once-proud working class has been residualised into a violent, degenerate, workless mob.”

Class and classism are under-researched topics in mainstream anthropology.

More riot-links:

Mapping the riots with poverty (Map by the Guardian 10.8.11)

From the Arab Spring to Liverpool? (Al Jazeera, 11.8.11)

London rioters resent media image of hooded teen thug (Reuters – Ahram Online 11.8.11)

Some thoughts on the London “riots”: Foucault’s genealogy of neoliberalism and “police as a public service” (Anthropoliteia: the anthropology of policing, 12.8.11)

Martha Nussbaum: Democracy at risk from emphasis on ‘useful machines (The Australian, 12.8.11)

Maia Green: News from the UK (Savage Minds, 10.8.11)

What’s Worse? Looting or Invading? (Robin Beste, Consortium News / Stop The War Coalition 15.8.11)

Thesis: Neoliberal policies, urban segregation and the Egyptian revolution

Ethnographic study: Why the education system fails white working-class children

"A postcolonial urban apartheid": Two anthropologists on the riots in France